Back in the late '90s the interactive advertising industry discovered a way to place an ad in front of the user by spawning a new window and having this window include a large rectangular unit or even a full Web page. This wonderful little unit was called "the pop-up,"and it quickly generated significant backlash from consumers, who said these units were annoying, intrusive and invasive. There was a dramatic drop in their effectiveness, and pop-ups were thus relegated to the background, with only a few direct-response advertisers still using them. Today a similar debate rages on surrounding the pre-roll.

Due to the reactive nature of the Internet economy to continuously and immediately oversupply any clearly defined demand, advertisers and advertising technologies have played, and continue to play, a defining role in crippling the Internet by creating demand for impressions.

Yesterday during Mother's Day, the kids all went into the family room. The PC was driven by two 17-year-old girls and overlooked by two 12-year-old boys. Of course the girls kept telling the boys to go outside and play. They wanted to be together and "check people out" on MySpace. Talk about social anthropology. They get together in person and talk and talk. Inevitably they end up sharing a chair in front of a computer with a broadband connection. The bulk of the conversation is showing each other their friend's postings, musings, cynicism and wacky photos on MySpace.

A very smart friend now handling general marketing and media strategy at a mega health-care and consumer package company called to see if I'd be available for a drink while he's in New York for the television upfronts. Of course I was interested in seeing my friend, but I was also increasingly curious about the upfront circus amidst our evolving and fluid media landscape. My friend noted, "Yeah, the upfronts are becoming more obsolete every year." So I asked why people still attend them, and he said: "I don't really know. The whole model is changing, though."

It's not often that you attend an investment banking conference and hear a great presentation about advertising and brand marketing, but that's what happened to me. I've spent the past two days at Think Equity Partners' Venture Capital Summit, "Think Tomorrow Today." While many of the keynote presentations were delivered by some very high-profile venture capitalists, this morning's breakfast keynote was presented by Jeff Hicks, the CEO of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. He did a great job showing off some of the company's recent work, but more important, he talked mostly about how the agency approaches its work with clients.

I enjoy hearing people's excitement when they pontificate on a new site or technology. I love witnessing the gleam in their eyes when they arrive at a personal epiphany or stumble upon a new solution to an old problem. Also fun, and something of a hobby of mine, is to enjoy seeing and hearing the new buzzwords, phrases, common misspellings and entirely new words that get thrown about and passed along from one excited person to another.

Any platform with aspirations to provide access to brand advertising opportunities across the new media landscape must be able to efficiently achieve "mutual relevancy" -- that is, emotional relevancy to the content and the viewer simultaneously. A key factor in achieving mutual relevancy in brand advertising will be the creation, adoption and mastery of "distributed creative development."

Could you imagine if the City of New York banned advertising in Times Square? How about advertising in all public spaces? Well, that's exactly what the city of São Paulo, Brazil, voted to do last September, by a vote of 45 to one, and it took effect January of this year. Madison Avenue has mostly swept this story under the rug, but it's real -- and daunting.

The last few weeks have been dizzying in the online ad industry. Google is buying DoubleClick for more than $3 billion. Experian is buying Hitwise for more than $400 million. Hachette is buying Jumpstart Automotive Media for approximately $100 million. And, to start off this week, Yahoo said it is buying the 80% of Right Media that it doesn't already own for $680 million and will be the primary sales channel and ad-serving provider for Comcast.net. So, if you are like most folks inside the industry, or are just an observer, you've been trying to figure out what this all ...